2021-01-25 - Boyce Lindsey and Wokal

Books that teach how to organize and create social movements

- organizing for the guilded age

- direct action protest and the reinvention of American Radicalism

- black block white riot

Rules for Radicals was one of the books, but is outdated now. Like Newton to Einstein.

Tactics are built around creating image and optics, very intentional.

- Wall of Moms in Portland was entirely preplanned

- Uhauls full of shields made of cut up industrial grade plastic barrels are

- Moving the Overton window is also preplanned

The godfather of these tactics is Edward Bernays. - Lindsey

From Beautiful Trouble (read by Wokal):

> The various options available on an issue can be roughly plotted on the spectrum of public acceptability from unthinkable to fringe to acceptable to common sense to policy. The Overton window named after Joseph Overton .. designates the range of points on the spectrom that are considered to be part of the sensible conversation in public opinion or traditional media. The important thing about the Overton window however is that it can be shifted to the left or to the right. The challenge for activists and advocates is to move the window in the direction of their prefered outcome. There are two ways to do this. The long hard way and the short easy way. The long hard way is to continue making your actual case persistently and persuasively until your position becomes more politically mainstream. Whether it is due to the strength of the rhetoric or the short or long term shift of societal values. By contrast the short easy way is to amplify and echo the voices of those who take a position a few notches more radical than what you want. For example if what your really want is a public health care option coordinate, push those promoting single payer. If the single payer approach constitutes the acceptable flank of the left discourse, then the public option looks by comparison, like the conservative option.

AOC and her like are liased by people who interface with the bomb throwing radicals.

Repressive Tolerance (Marcuse) inspired the riots of '67 and '68. (Everything conservative is bad). Marcuse argues that anything center or far right leads to fascism.

Liberalism is expand the Overton window in all directions. Conservatism is lets narrow the Overton window and make what is unacceptable a larger group and what is acceptable a smaller group and probably to bend that somewhat rightward and traditionally. Monarchy and fascism aren't the same thing, but these far right illiberal ideas have been very successfully shoved out of the Overton window. "Trad" life has been successfully shoved out as evil patriarchy. To defend people's right to live a "trad" life is framed as supporting a totalizing patriarchy. This new religion believes that once these repressive forces have been stamped out, then liberation is at hand.

Older examples of this new religion in action:

- Lysinkism (agricultural science) in Russia posited that if you planted wheat closer together they would cooperate to make better wheat (i.e. communist wheat)

- Mao posited that only the foreign birds were ravaging the fruit crops. So he decreed that only 5 species of birds were truly Chinese and organized a year long campaign to decimate all other bird species. Millions of birds were killed, but bug populations exploded and wiped out the crops.

Defending Hitler is outside the pale, not so with Stalin and Mao. 2020 went up in flames for months with leftist rioting winked at but the one day Capitol riot has been thoroughly framed as fascist.

Aside: You should never shorten a person's name for them. - Lindsey

Another book to buy: